Robbins Island (Tasmania)
Videos
Robbins Island is a 9,900-hectare island located in Bass Strait, lying off the northwest coast of Tasmania, Australia. The island, separated from the Tasmanian mainland by a highly tidal area known as
Robbins Island shown in blue
Sign at crossing to Robbins Island from Tasmanian mainland.
Aboriginal Tasmanians
Videos
Aboriginal Tasmanians are the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, the large island south of mainland Australia. Aboriginal people lived in Tasmania for tens of thousands of years before European settlement
Illustration from The Last of the Tasmanians – Woureddy, Truganini's husband
A picture of the last four Tasmanian Aboriginal people of solely Aboriginal descent c. 1860s. Truganini, the last to survive, is seated at far right.
Horace Watson recording the songs of Fanny Cochrane Smith, considered to be the last fluent speaker of a Tasmanian language, 1903. Singer Bruce Watson, descendant of Watson, composed a song about this picture and later performed it with singer Ronnie Summers, a descendant of Smith.
Robert Dowling, Group of Natives of Tasmania, 1859. Critic Bernard William Smith assessed the work as a "history painting in the full sense of the word", with the natives "seated – emblematic of their situation – around the dying embers of a burnt-out log near a great blackened stump, and in the far left corner there is a leafless tree with shattered branches."